


faster than a speeding bullet

by strayphoenix



Series: How Far We've Come [4]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-09
Updated: 2012-06-09
Packaged: 2018-09-17 02:12:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9299561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strayphoenix/pseuds/strayphoenix
Summary: Seventy-five seconds, Artemis muses. She’s still staring at the pretty blinking dashboard lights inside the missile head. What happened to finishing her Vietnamese History Powerpoint? What happened to moving to Star City when they graduated? What happened to the ring in a drawer she wasn’t supposed to have found under Wally’s underwear? Even Barry Allen, at top speed, couldn’t pull all that off in seventy-five seconds.





	

The missile groans beneath her, a gash, a gaping sound that shakes even the blood cells in her veins. It’s all Artemis can do to stand as it rumbles beneath her, propulsion starting. Ninety seconds between propulsion and take-off, Nightwing had told her. Five between primary thrusters and secondary.

She sags against the wall, a ragdoll goddess, and tosses the alien bomb — disarmed, useless  now — towards the knocked out bodies of the Black Manta henchmen without a thought. The world is spinning behind her eyes, her breathing sharp. She’d been stupid to take Nightwing’s offer. Stupid to accept when she knew she was out of practice and not nearly paranoid enough and calling in a favor and Wally had been right.

Her stomach bottoms out, and not from the fear. The rocket’s preprogrammed destination, now _her_ destination, is the furthest thing from her mind.

Murphy’s science had never been kind to her. Of course, _this_ could go wrong.

The thundering of the propulsion is body blinding, deafening and numbing, but Artemis sits against the far wall of the missile blanketed by wires. Blankly, she watches the flashing buttons, the infinite colors of the missile head juxtaposed by the black of the two fallen henchmen; the navy blue, wakeboard sized bomb.

They’d had a fifteen minute window and that stopwatch ticked out two lucky shots and five seconds ago.

Someone is shouting in her comm, but she can hardly hear them over the roar of the engines. She presses her hand to her ear, driving the earpiece into her brain. The steadiness of her voice surprises even her. “Yeah?”

“Artemis, where are you?” Nightwing’s shouting to be heard over the roar, and there’s an urgency to his voice that’s usually masked by his icy calm resolve. “Artemis?!”

She tries to shout back that’s she’s still covering his ass but she’s still reeling from jab to her solar plexus and the lucky hook to her spleen and is having trouble breathing right. The roar of the rocket drowns her out easily.

Ninety seconds from propulsion to take-off. Now it’s less, the seconds ticking away and her body groaning, fighting to work.

Artemis doesn’t want to believe in giving up.

 _Artemis!_ It’s M’gann now, in her head. The voice is loud, the roar of the engines louder. _Artemis, where are you?_ Nightwing again, patched in. She can feel now, rather than just hear the unease behind his throbbing thoughts.

She’d come because he’d asked. Because he’d dredged up the Reds, the home invasion. Because he told her that he’d never trust anyone more to have his back. And considering the growth of the Bat family, that meant a considerable deal to her.

Artemis pictures the little level-headed boy in the air vent when she answers, _I’m in the missile head._

 _What?!_ Superboy shouts, strong and fierce and bulletproof. _What are you doing? Get out of there!_

The emotion echoes around the team, old and new, as they all realize where she still is, what it means. She feels Miss Martian, solid as water, languid where Superboy was always immovable, leaping from the seat of the Bioship. _I’ll grab her! I can density shift through the hood and—_

 _Those jets are spewing out heat in the thousands of degrees. It’ll render you powerless before you’re even close,_ Nightwing thinks back and his thoughts have no unease in them now. No worry, no panic. Just…resignation. Placid and even.

He doesn’t need to say anything. Nightwing would never abandon a situation unless it was completely hopeless. Unless he was completely sure he couldn’t take the bullet himself.

Still, he directs the younger teammates to try and stall the launch, to try to find an override, but it’s to keep them busy. Keep them off the link.

M’gann, Conner, Dick, and Artemis know.

 _How much time?_ Conner asks, emotionlessly.

 _Seventy-five seconds,_ Dick says.

Seventy-five seconds, Artemis muses. She’s still staring at the pretty blinking dashboard lights inside the missile head. What happened to finishing her Vietnamese History Powerpoint? What happened to moving to Star City when they graduated? What happened to the ring in a drawer she wasn’t supposed to have found under Wally’s underwear? Even Barry Allen, at top speed, couldn’t pull all that off in seventy-five seconds.

 _Artemis._ It’s Dick. It’s gentle. _You okay?_

 _Traught as can be,_ she answers easily. The words are whiskey smooth over her tongue, the aftertaste only kicking in when Dick doesn’t laugh.

There’s silence, as much silence as can be granted under the roar, but even then, it isn’t really silence. There’s M’gann, floating at the edge of her heat threshold, too far away, willing with far more than her telekinesis for the rocket to stop, for the chance to hold her. There’s Conner, silent and solid, betraying so much in the tendrils of strength he sends her. There’s Dick, his mind whirring, a steampunk dream running through all the options twice, three times, biting back the bile of regret until he’s sure there’s nothing else left.

Then, there’s Tim. The new Robin, quiet and sad and sorry to intrude.

_Who’s going to tell Wally?_

It’ll be hours before she really runs out of oxygen, but Artemis’s throat closes up just the same.

Wally had been furious about the mission five hours ago. He’d made her dinner, a failed attempt at Vietnamese cuisine, the night before. He’d been sleeping beside her not twelve hours ago, warm and shirtless and hopelessly in love with her. He’d been kissing her every day since Valentine’s Day.

She’s on her feet, grabbing the thicker wires for support because the entire missile is shaking so much now it’s an earthquake. Her feet pull her towards the door, one after the other. This is how you walk. This is how you run when you have nowhere else to go.

Something hits her a million miles an hour in her right temple. So fast, so hard, she collapses onto the floor before she realizes it came from inside her head.

 _ARTEMIS!_ Wally’s voice shouts in her head, his mind colliding with hers at the speeds he is running. _Artemis, hold on, I’m coming!_

He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s going to be here.

The thought terrifies her more than the opposite.

 _Wally, there’s thirty—_ Nightwing starts, and the hate Dick feels at himself in that moment is only matched by the speedster’s.

 _SHUT UP!_ Wally roars at him, anger louder than the fire, louder than the sun. _SHUT UP!! Artemis, babe, listen to me, I’m coming!_

Thirty seconds. She does the math. If he’s just gotten in range, even at his top speed, even if he has a booster to his back, he isn’t going to make it.

 _Decided to join the party after all?_ she finds herself thinking at him. Like she’s teasing him about being squeamish about his inner elbows when she kisses him there. Like thirty seconds is all the time in the world.

Artemis sees through his eyes, the landscape an Impressionist whirlwind of color, his focus on the missiles alone, as he thinks hard into her head, __I_ t’s going to be all right, babe. I’m almost there. I can make it. I can make it!_

“I love you,” she wants to say. She wants to purr it against his lips, against his mind, but she knows if she does, then she really is giving up. Then she really is going into space with nothing but these moments to shield her from the cold.

She says it anyway.

 _I’m going to be fast enough!_ Every syllable is a punch into her head, loaded with speed, with the determination that he _has_ to be. _I’m going to be fast enough! Just hold on!_

But she can feel the tears on both their faces, and it’s not the wind because he’s wearing goggles and it’s not the ship because she isn’t scared. Artemis realizes she’d made peace with her deities the night Jade left, before the morning came and it would be just her and _dad_.

Jade. Her mom.

They aren’t even going to have a body to bury. She hopes the missile streaks through the sky like a star.

 _Go to the door,_ he instructs her thickly, _Go to the door so I can grab you. I’m almost there, Artemis, I SWEAR I am gonna get you out of this._

Artemis makes it the rest of the way on her stomach, crawling as the missile jostles the bones sheathed in her tendons, her brain rattling in her skull. But the door is just that, a door. It isn’t a hatch to the outside, just a path to a corridor to a thousand more. She knows this. Wally knows this.

Hadn’t he spent one whole summer with her in his lap, in his backyard, teaching her how to build a bottle rocket? Wally knew how this was going to go down better than she herself did. And still he is hoping. Still he is banking on a miracle.

Charming, vulnerable, inconvincible Wally. Who never believed in anything except in physics and in her.

Artemis wrenches her eyes closed tight and Nightwing gives the order and Miss Martian doesn’t flinch, doesn’t miss her window. M’gann snatches Wally from the ground, frictionless, speedless, and he screams to be let go, trying to vibrate through invisible hands that hold him at a molecular level. His mind buzzes, like Dick’s, but Wally’s mind is a swarm of bees, of lightning bugs in a paper bag, ready to do anything to get out, to get to her. No worry for risk. No patience for worry.

_LET GO OF ME! Artemis—!!_

Somewhere between resignation and self deprecating humor, she asks Dick for the time. He knows what she means. Ten seconds till liftoff. She can’t bear ten seconds of him screaming.

 _It’s okay,_ she says softly, soothing the freckled fifteen-year-old boy who shakes as he tells her how he fell in love with her in the snow. She hates herself now more than ever because she’d promised him it wasn’t real. She promised him he would never have to lose her again. _It’s okay, Wally. I’ll send postcards._

_NO! ARTEMIS!!_

Something in Wally’s thoughts, the timbre of white hot hate muddled under the panic and the speed, reminds her of Kaldur. Sturdy, reliable Kaldur, who collapsed from the inside out because all the logic and strategy in the world would never bring back Tula.

Five seconds.

 _Say goodbye to Kaldur for me._ The words are firm, oversaturated with double meaning, emotions she’ll never be able to fully articulate in time, and they’re meant for everyone and for him.

_ARTE—!!_

The world gives a lurch.

And Artemis thinks it’s a good thing she’s already on the floor, because gravity is pressing her there anyway. It’s the weight of the world, she realizes. Literally. It pins her insides and her outsides to the ground, her body trying to hold onto gravity with everything it has.

She doesn’t know why she expects an explosion, a bright white light and a rush and the end. Conditioning, maybe. Wishful thinking. Too many explosions in her lifetime to expect no other way to go.

But there’s no sudden finality after the clock hits zero. No fireworks, no fire. Just the bone-bending claw of gravity and the very human crush of terror and…

Them.

Even with her eyes closed shut and her ears fighting the deafening roar, she can hear Nightwing to the others, calling orders; Superboy holding position; Miss Martian flying, binding them all together still, despite the miles the missile must be above earth, despite the only way this is going to end, her telepathy still holding Artemis to them. To him.

 _Wally?_ Artemis asks into the dark.

She wishes there were a window. You couldn’t ever see the stars from Gotham and always from Palo Alto. She loves the stars because they have always been Wally’s. She’d kissed him for the first time under the stars, unfettered by the flickering of an atmosphere, in the crystal clear observatory of the Watchtower. She hadn’t missed a single celestial event in five years, first by the telescope in his bedroom, then by the one in theirs. He was alive under the stars, and she wishes she could be too.

 _Artemis?_ He’s surprised, desperate, relieved and terrified all at once. _Artemis! We’re scrambling the bioship _,__ he assures her, assures himself. _We’re coming to get you! I promise, I’m going to get you back!_

It’s a nice thought. A promise she wishes he could keep. But promises weren’t really ever meant for keeping in this line of work.

 _No,_ she thinks back softly, focusing on his voice as she flies into the void in a metal womb, scared and alone and knowing she did the right thing but hating it anyway. _No, just… stay with me._

His thoughts choke. She didn’t think they could do that. _We’re going to—_

She doesn’t need the rescue party, though it’d be nice. She doesn’t need the daring escape or the heroic escapades that would have already happened if Dick knew they could. She wants this. Just Wally and her and suddenly space is so cold.

_Just stay. Please. Stay with me._

_Artemis, it’s going to be okay…_ he says, but his voice feels far away now. She’s flying out of range of M’gann. Out of range of air and warmth and the home of his words, of his gaze. __I’m not going to…__

There is silence. There is space. There is no more pressure and no more gravity and no more hope.

 _Wally?_ she asks again, quietly across the expanse. There is no answer.

Artemis waits another ninety seconds to be sure his voice is really gone. She counts them in her head, by the beat of her heart. She makes sure that she is really alone in space, though the irony of the thought is almost laughable.

She imagines the team, the lot of them, as they were when she’d met them. She, a lonely soul with everything to prove because poison ran in her veins. She remembers, back then, Kaldur’s faith in her, Conner’s lack of judgment. She remembers M’gann’s affection when neither of them knew the meaning of the word. She remembers Dick’s camaraderie because he was a lonely soul too. She remembers Wally’s smile, and how it never changed.

It’s all she sees when she pulls one of the Manta henchmen’s guns from its holster.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this the night before "Depths." My prior experience with comic book death (cough Giant Size Astonishing X-Men cough) had me totally convinced this was in general what was going to happen. I turned out wrong, but I still wanted to churn out this story before then, just in case. Innumerable thanks to Brella for staying up late into the night with me to beta and encourage so I could get this out on time.
> 
> I'm adding all my old YJ fics to AO3 from FF and Tumblr just so I can keep track of all of them. I don't use this particular writing style much any more, but I'd appreciate any and all kudos and comments regardless.


End file.
